Painful photographs

[steevdavis62]

I was taking photos of a small flower today, on a potter shrub on my verandah. Anyhow, i had taken bout 5 photos, when i happened to lift the branches and noticed, less then 5cm from my face, this wasp nest... I must say it scared the bugger out of me, but seeing that none of them bit me. I decided to try my luck with quickly snapping a couple of photo's and then taking off. Well i didnt get any fantastic photos, but i did get this one, which i didnt mind. I think the fact i was so close to a wasp nest with out realising it, then was able to photograph them and not get bitten is what makes me appreciate this photo.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/62342462@N00/381707791/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/133/381707791_d3eb93e395.jpg" width="500" height="246" alt="wasp" /></a>

But what i was wondering, does anyone have stories out there like this. Where they where photographing something dangerous or painful. Doesnt matter if you did or didnt get hurt, a story is a good story. Please share :)

[Sita 900]

Neat picture, I'd be way too nervous to come into contact with those little death machines. Bottom is a little too bright for me, but I like it still :)

I have no stories. I lead a pretty boring life :-(

[steevdavis62]

lol thanks... yeh it was a really sunny day, and bits of light where unfortunatly filtering through the leaves, and that bit did over expose. probably a way to fix it on photoshop, i just dont know it...

I didnt intentionally run into them, trust me, but seeing i did accidently, it was lucky. I forgot to mention, that was actually shooting on macro mode, not zoom. so i really was about 2 inches from them..

[steevdavis62]

This is just another one i took the other day, of some nasty little cirtters.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/62342462@N00/383128125/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/175/383128125_6abbcea19f.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="DSCF1828" /></a>

[Sita 900]

are those ants? they aren't nasty!! Haha my boyfriend and I have pet ants in an ant farm! B) Ants are hard to photograph... I've tried before, good job!

[steevdavis62]

They indeed are ants.. Im sorry if i offended your ants, im sure your ants are very cute. Just when u get bitten by ants, they dont seem so cute anymore... lol, yeh took me many tries to get this photo. But thanks for the compliment, you have any photos of your ants?

[stuart]

wow thats a great shot ive tried the same thing but with bees and from a distance, the bee was always a bit blurry mostly me and the fact that a much better lense would help im sure

[steevdavis62]

LoL doesnt always need a good lense. that was just my fujifilm S700's on macro mode... no special lense. But yeh, bee's would be alot harder, because they fly, and sting. If you wanna film ants, find a nice littel branch, put some honey down.. leave it for 2 hours and then come back, and u have heaps of subjects running around

[stuart]

macro mode that sounds neat how does that work? does the camera alow you shorter focusing distance???

[steevdavis62]

Yeh its just a setting that those of us who cant afford DSLR's and macro lense uses. Most small P/S and digital camera's have it. Its usually represented by a small flower, that looks like a tulip, and on modes wheel. What sort of camera do you use?

Yeh it shortens your focusing distance alot. Mine is great, i keep bumping my lense on objects im trying to photograph, while still in full focus.

[dunphyk]

I didn't plan it that way...

I wanted a photo of a very deep crevace in a particular cliff face near St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada. My girlfriend and I went to this location. We climbed to the top of the cliff, and I lay on the ground on my stomach, and crawled halfway over the edge of the cliff so I was looking essentially straight down in to the crevace. It was approximately a 400' drop to the North Atlantic ocean at the bottom. This was before digital cameras, so I don't have the photos immediately handy to share... sorry...

My wife noticed a VERY large quantity of insects beginning to crawl over me. She HATES insects, and started to become very animated at the site fo them crawling on me. They were mostly ants, and bugs don't don't really bother me too much, but given her agitated state, I thought there may be more going on than was safe.

I immediately shrank back from the edge of the cliff. But in the panic, I momentarily forgot the precarious circumstances of my position. If I had not taken care to ensure my center of gravity was well on the solid ground side of the cliff face before I lept up to see what she losing her mind about, I might not be here to write this.

And yes, I did marry her - I know, I'm a glutton for punishment...

But I love her dearly!

[Lani_D]

Believe it or not i sorta had one of those moments today! Some friends and I went bush walking in the blue mountains with the intention of getting some wicked shots. As were walking along the track to a lookout, my friend sees this waterfall but his shot is blocked by a heap of thick scrub. So he decides hes going off the track to the cliff ledge to get his photo....i couldnt watch. we were like a zillion kilometers up i was sure he was going to slip and fall. So i kept walking then all of a sudden i hear this "aargh!" (scream noise). i nearly had a heart attack, until he stuck his head back out on the track and started laughing at me! BOYS!

This was the shot he got tho if your interested
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/60013592@N00/392807893/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/142/392807893_452238ead1.jpg" width="334" height="500" alt="DSC02499" /></a>

[steevdavis62]

wow...both those storis are pretty intense. Shows some serious dedication to photography. I cant say i have ever risked my life to get a photograph, although im sure it would give the photo alot more meaning.

Lani, i love that photo. A little bit of photoshop work and it will be a stunner. Definatly worth the risk :)

[Lani_D]

yea, we officially gave him "photo of the day" for that shot...couldnt have paid me to get out there and get it myself tho!:)

[steevdavis62]

True. gotta love the blue mountains....i just moved down to Cooranbong, just out of sydney on the north side... love the blueys

[Lani_D]

i love sydney. i live out west right at the foot of the blue mountains but i work in sydney

[Suze]

Keeping this thread in mind and the shallow depth of field I was taking some photos on Friday with lots of bees around. I got one photo (this one) with a bee on the flower, deciding that my camera wasn't going to do a close shot of the bee without annoying it.

I changed to taking just photos of flowers but too late. Nice bee sting to my finger :-).

I can't say if this was the bee that stung me LOL.
Suze
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/149/392363071_9277415595.jpg

[steevdavis62]

thats a great capture of the bee, i like it surrounded by the flower. its gives the bee more persective and relevance....

At least you have the satisfaction of knowing the bee that stung you died :)

[Suze]

thats a great capture of the bee, i like it surrounded by the flower. its gives the bee more persective and relevance....

At least you have the satisfaction of knowing the bee that stung you died :)

Thanks :-). I've had two nice comments in a day, one from you and one cropped up on flickr. My thought for the flickr one was OMG somebody actually looked at something I put here LOL.

I felt the photo with the bee could have done with being closer and crisper but I felt that it would dramatically increase my chance of being stung. How ironic that I moved away and got stung anyway.

This was taken at a cafe/shop at Warnervale just a stone's throw from you (well compared to some of the other places photos are taken).

I'm still chuckling re your comment about the bee dying. :-)

Suze

[Learner]

Suze: You also have this beautiful picture of a very interesting,colorful flower. Great Capture!

[steevdavis62]

Dont worry suze, this is forum is a great place to get compliments. keep taking nice photos and soon you won't know what to do with yourself :)

[Liquid Cheese]

All those stories were rather intense, particularly the ones in the mountains. I'm terrified of heights.

[softcell72]

My computer is just back up from a reformat so this is the only picture that I can access right now and don't have the original to upload to imageshack or other right now.

I was actually hanging out on a tree branch to get this shot, Snoqualmie Falls in Washington state. they have a fenced off area where you are supposed to stay and view etc but alot of people do actually climb down to the actual falls inself(I was one of them) however to get this one I climbed from the railing out onto a tree branch that hung over. There was really no other way to do it just due the the fact that if I had stayed on the rail there would have been people in the way and if I had climed down it would have been harder to show the actual size of the falls in perspective to the person standing there.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/38981872/?qo=40&q=by%3Asoftcell72+in%3Aphotography&qh=sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps

[Simon]

are those ants? they aren't nasty!! Haha my boyfriend and I have pet ants in an ant farm! B) Ants are hard to photograph... I've tried before, good job!

its blurry. you couldn't even tell if they were ants. how is that a good job? thanks. maybe i am missing something.

[Suze]

I was actually hanging out on a tree branch to get this shot, Snoqualmie Falls in Washington state. they have a fenced off area where you are supposed to stay and view etc but alot of people do actually climb down to the actual falls inself(I was one of them) however to get this one I climbed from the railing out onto a tree branch that hung over. There was really no other way to do it just due the the fact that if I had stayed on the rail there would have been people in the way and if I had climed down it would have been harder to show the actual size of the falls in perspective to the person standing there.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/38981872/?qo=40&q=by%3Asoftcell72+in%3Aphotography&qh=sort%3Atime+-in%3Ascraps

Awsome photo! The person in it really does make the picture. I never would have dreamed the falls were so big otherwise.
Suze

[Dr. WooD]

Not as frightening as bee's or ants, but this little dude could put a hurting on ya.

I did have a run in with fire ants once. I had just moved to Florida, and had no idea what a fire ant was. I rented an old house when I first moved here, and the drive way was done in tile. I was changing the oil in my bike, and needed to lay on the ground to get the oil drain out. I noticed there were a few ants there between the tiles, but thought nothing of it. Needless to say when you lay on a fire ant mound hundreds/thousands come out in a big hurry. They were in my shirt, down my pants...........Got nailed a few dozen times before I could get out of my cloths. Glad nobody had a camera around.


http://i32.photobucket.com/albums/d19/Wood420/rs02b.jpg

[Bobscaught]

I was doing a story on mountain climbing for a local TV station before I realized the lengths I'd have to go through. In order to get a good angle I had to also repel down to where my subject was. Only catch was that I had to wear the repelling gear backwards. Being a guy that was very painful on my...well you get the idea!

[klew]

I was snorkeling over a shallow reef between two small motus (islands) off Moorea when a fish bit me twice on the palm of my hand and once on the leg. It was a parrotfish, who have hard beaks to scrape coral off rocks for food, so it hurt. I wonder if I got too close to its home. I was also taking pictures with an underwater disposable camera (no scanner, so no fish pic), but I took a picture of my hand when I got back to the hut (what's that, a good half-inch?).

http://static.zooomr.com/images/1065912_4d6a10ceff.jpg (http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/kevinlew/1065912)

[mediaphile]

i'm not sure if this counts, but this was a painful photograph for me to take:

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/206/486187582_b4a81bf63b_o.jpg

grandma's second hernia surgery. she's getting up there in age, so it was scary at the time, but everything went fine in the end. i'm not sure if this thread was about photographs that were literally painful to take, so i may have missed the mark here.

[jiminyClickit]

mediaphile, Welcome

Half the fun is seeing how different people interprete differently. This would have been painful for me to take, yes.

[scrivna]

this what quite painful at the time

[Shelley]

When I go on the hunt for flowers or bugs, I dont' usually pay attention to what is around me. I had a new 60mm macro lens and was busy getting close ups of everything. I saw this bush that had a bee or two on it and they seemed to stay in a relatively small area so I decided to try to get some shots. Well, I started to follow this one bee around. I finally got my shot and looked up to see that this bush (and several near it) were about 4 feet tall and FULL of bees! I stepped on a bumblebee once as a child, it was dead, but I learned it could still sting. Haven't liked them since. I least I got a decent photo.

[svenblom]

Attack in Thailand!

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/svenmoniek/184791880/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/78/184791880_f0854c3710.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="IMG_0328" /></a>

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/svenmoniek/184791908/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/67/184791908_84b655aaee.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="IMG_0329" /></a>

[JJthethird]

this what quite painful at the time


Yes, that definately looks painful!

:eek: John.